Growing the Team: Establishing Short Iterations

Establishing short iterations

The results of the interviews served as a starting point for our scaled agile development process. It turned out that implementing really short development cycles was extremely important. We established release cycles lasting three weeks, each consisting of three one-week iterations. The goal of each release cycle was some additional useful functionality for the customer.

Installing short iterations, a closed release cycle, and an always-running system

One of the main arguments for installing short iterations was that we wanted to be able to correct mistakes as early as possible. Only a closed release cycle, which is a cycle that lasts for a defined time and concludes with a specified outcome, gave us the possibility of evaluating the system under development. Insisting on an always-running system helped us detect major issues right at the beginning like integration, how to implement acceptance tests, and how to bring the system into production. We preferred to solve these issues, as long as the system was rather small, because this allowed us to try different approaches, rather than address those issues later on when the system had gotten big.